Clare Droesch, Boston College Class of 2005, lost her long battle with cancer of May 11, 2018. I interviewed Clare before her induction to BC’s Hall of Fame in 2016. The biography of Clare that I wrote for the evening’s program follows.

When the time came for New York’s 2001 High School Basketball Player of the Year to choose a college, she decided that she wanted to build something grand, to be a part of a new tradition. That’s why Clare Droesch spurned offers from Connecticut, Notre Dame, Purdue and others to come from Christ the King High School to Boston College.

“My school was the UConn of high schools. I wanted to go to a place where we’d beat the best teams, where we’d leave a mark and be a school that other kids would look up to and want to go to,” she said.

Clare Droesch carried through. A sharp shooting, fearless point guard and inspirational leader on and off the court, Clare became an indispensable contributor to a golden era of Boston College women’s basketball under coach Cathy Inglese.

Inglese was in her ninth year of coaching the Eagle women when Droesch arrived. Rebuilding had gone well, with winning records in five of the previous six seasons. Still, they’d never won a Big East Tournament. In the previous four years, they’d gone 1-8 against their nemesis, Connecticut.

The Eagles reached the NCAA Tournament in all four years of Clare’s career. They made it to the Sweet Sixteen twice. In 2004 they won the Big East championship after knocking out top-ranked UConn in the semifinals.

In 2005, when Clare was team captain, they defeated Number-One ranked UConn again, in Clare’s final home game. The score was 51-48, and the game was nationally televised – no better way for Droesch to cap off her playing days.

Clare played in 126 games between 2001 and 2005. The Eagles won 92 of them. If Boston College needed a basket, Clare Droesch wanted the ball in her hands.

during the second round of the Women’s NCAA Tournament Sunday, March 22, 2005, at the Smith Center in Chapel Hill N.C. (Kevin C. Cox/WireImage)

“She had such a desire to win. When the game was on the line, she always wanted to take that last shot. She was also one of the best passers on the team,” said Inglese.

“And in the locker room, before the game, when we were in the semifinals of the Big East Tournament against Connecticut…the way that she got the team fired up. I can’t forget that.”

Droesch was Inglese’s first big-name recruit from New York City. News of her arrival gave the program an additional level of prestige. For her first two years, Clare didn’t start, but she frequently logged more minutes than starters. As a freshman, she earned her a spot on the Big East All-Rookie team.

When Clare graduated in 2005, her 1,136 career points placed her twelfth all-time at Boston College. She was also twelfth in rebounds with 539; sixth in assists with 324; and third all time in three-pointers, with 158. She was honored as an ACC Legend in 2015.

Those impressive accolades and numbers don’t tell the entire story of Clare Droesch. While she always wanted to take her shot at crunch time, she also saw that her primary job was to be the vocal, outspoken bellwether who got every other player charged up to play her best.

“I never had to do that in high school,” she said. “We were a run-and-gun team, and I was the best player, the big scorer. Everyone else just followed me.”

The adjustment to college ball was hard for Clare. She learned to play defense, because, as she puts it “Coach Inglese made it very clear that if you didn’t play defense, you weren’t going to play.”

Even today, it’s “Coach,” not “Cathy” Inglese. “She made me a better overall player. That’s why I succeeded in college. I didn’t do a lot of different things, but I did them in a different way, trying to make myself more valuable to the team,” explains Clare.

“I was the type of player who wanted to do things my own way. But Coach Inglese really knew how to run the offense, and it was a matter of getting the best shot for the team. I was open at some times, but I didn’t always have the green light.”

Hunkering down to conform to the system worked for Droesch’s playing career. And now, as she coaches high school players back in New York, she finds herself employing the same approach that Inglese took with her.

Clare fondly remembers the help and mentoring by Inglese’s assistants, Kelly Cole and Bill Gould. “My rocks as coaches,” she says.

She’s also grateful to Donna Bennett, BC’s assistant director of sports medicine. In junior year, Clare suffered a foot injury and developed plantar fasciitis. The excruciating pain spread up through her shins. Bennett worked with Clare every day, keeping her fit to play with massages, shots, hot packs, and cold packs. Clare played through the pain, never missed a game, and waited until graduation for corrective surgery.

After college, Clare’s pro career was all too brief. While playing in Portugal, she hurt her previously uninjured foot by overcompensating to protect the other one. So she turned first to college coaching, with stops at UMass-Boston, Vanderbilt, and Saint John’s.

Working with younger, more impressionable athletes was more to her liking, however. She’s now in her fifth year as assistant varsity coach at her high school alma mater, Christ the King. She’s also in her fifth year of a battle with cancer.

On December 19, 2011, Clare was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. Tumors also spread to her spine and hip. Radiation treatments followed, then chemotherapy. Every other Monday, she’s at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The rest of the time, it’s basketball coaching and time with her family – parents George and Patty, and brother George – and friends back in Rockaway.

“My support system has been amazing, both from my family and from my friends at Boston College. When I got sick, I reached out to my BC family. I truly love Boston College. I still go there all the time, and I’m still close with the coaches.”

It was just that three-letter word, relates author Catherine Marenghi, that set her firmly on her way to a prosperous business career.

The quoted speaker was Mrs. Robbins, Ms Marenghi’s her junior-high-school English teacher in Milford, Massachusetts. Catherine had just passed in her assignment, a short poem about the war which was then raging in Southeast Asia.

“I watched the expression on her face,” said Catherine. “She looked up at me, and smacked herself on the forehead, and said ‘Wow! You can write!’”

Mrs. Robbins was one of the heroes of whom Ms Marenghi spoke in her keynote address at the Tri-County United Way’s “Everyday Heroes” recognition breakfast on April 5. As she explained to the crowd in Framingham, the town where she was born and where she launched her working life in the high-technology sector, that teacher and several others along the way have given Catherine a rather different notion of what it means to be a hero.

“Heroes are people we put up on a pedestal. Heroes are people we believe in. But I think it is the opposite.

“Heroes are people who believe in you.”

“That tiny little word, ‘wow’ actually changed my life. It made me know who I am. It told me what I was good at. I knew that whatever kind of work I would do in my life, I always had in my heart of hearts that I was a writer. …

“All it took was one teacher, and that little word. It showed me what a difference we can make in somebody’s life, with those little words, those little actions that we can do every day.”

Catherine Marenghi with the original edition of her memoir at the 2014 book launch.

In fact, it wasn’t just that one teacher. There were several of them who, as she pointed out in her inspiring memoir, Glad Farm, recognized her potential as a superior student. They encouraged her to make the most of her talents in order to escape the grinding poverty of her early life. So did her parents. Despite the most straitened of economic circumstances after their gladiolus farm failed, they never missed an opportunity to let their youngest daughter know how special she was, how she could do anything.

Catherine Marenghi was valedictorian of Milford High’s Class of 1972. Her academic record and demonstrable financial need brought her several full scholarship offers. She chose Tufts and made the most of it. Her talent and love for writing have undergirded her entire career. Mrs. Robbins certainly nailed it that day back in junior high.

There was another message about education that I took away from Catherine’s keynote talk. Yes, without a good education you can’t do a whole lot with your life. But what does it take to offer that good education, to make it available to the young people who also “get it” and who desire to make the most of themselves?

As Catherine pointed out, the Milford schools were not highly rated or regarded. The buildings were old and their facilities were substandard. But, as she says,

With three career teachers at the United Way breakfast: my elementary school classmate Mary Kennedy Cali, wife Mary Ellen, and Lorraine Polo – all career teachers, all heroes.

“We had amazing teachers. People who had devoted their lives to teaching. And I was lucky enough to have several of them.”

To that, I can certainly relate. I’ve been married to an amazing teacher for 43 years. I saw how hard she worked. I know how she encouraged and prodded and loved her first graders into believing in themselves. I’ve read and re-read the hundreds of cards and notes she’s received from former students over her own 35 years in the elementary classroom. They were lucky to have her, and I’m sure she’s a hero to many of them too.

Her early life was scandalous. She appeared naked, on the movie screen, running through the woods and swimming in a lake, the first woman ever shown in the altogether.

That was in Ecstasy, made in Czechoslovakia in 1933. She also acted out sexual climax, writhing and moaning in a bliss that would have made Meg Ryan blush. Her films were luscious cinematic forbidden fruit, banned almost everywhere. Benito Mussolini owned and treasured a personal copy of Ecstasy.

And she was beautiful. Hedwig Kiesler had a perfect face, raven hair, and a slim delicate figure. Men lusted for her. The first man to have her – that’s not the right word, nobody ever truly had her – was Friedrich Mandl, the first of her six husbands.

He was one of the richest men is Austria. She was his trophy wife. His company, Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik, sold ammunition and was the one of the leading arms makers in Europe. He was a Fascist sympathizer, supplying the war machines of anyone who’d buy his wares.

Mandl showcased Hedwig at dinners and banquets with the likes of Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. She acted the part of a brainless beauty. She often said that the secret of glamor was to “stand there and look stupid.” So she did. It was a superb performance, maybe the best acting job of her career.

Hedwig Kiesler was a genius. Daughter of a Jewish banker, she had excelled in school, especially in math and science. She was born in Vienna on November 9, 1914. She quit school at 16 to study acting. In the late 1920’s Hedy was discovered and brought to Berlin by director and acting instructor Max Reinhardt. Following her training in the theater, she returned to Vienna and began to work in the film industry. She married Mandl, who was 30 years older than she, in 1933.

Eavesdropping Inside the Third Reich

When her husband and the evil dictators sat around talking shop, she sat there, looked pretty, and took it all in. She knew what they were talking about, and she knew what they were up to.

A favorite topic of Adolf Hitler was military technology, especially of the type that could control missiles and torpedoes by radio. Wireless control of weapons would be a huge jump from the hard-wired methods then in use. Wireless did come into use during the 1940s, by both Allies and Axis forces. But it was single-frequency radio, easy to monitor, detect, and jam.

According to one account, Mandl and Hitler engaged in a drunken menage à trois after a dinner party. Mandl was desperate to cement a big arms deal. The third party in the threesome was his gorgeous wife. That story is from a widely-panned book,What Almost Happened to Hedy Lamarr, and its truth is in doubt.

Even if it is true, that may or may not have been the final straw for Kiesler. As a Jew, she came to hate Nazis. She despised her husband’s business ambitions, and she did not share her thoughts about science and technology. If anything, she would share her information with the Allies who were fighting against the Nazis.

The radio-controlled guidance system for torpedoes that she heard discussed never got into production because it was too susceptible to disruption. Somewhere along the way she got the idea of distributing the guidance signal over several frequencies. This would protect it from enemy jamming. But she still had to figure out how to synchronize the transmitter and receiver. The solution would come to her later.

Hedy and Mandl

Mandl came to know how she felt about him, and he kept her locked up in his castle, Schloss Schwarzenau. He had also forbade her to pursue acting, and tried to buy up all copies of Ecstasy.

In 1937, Hedwig escaped by drugging her maid and sneaking out of the castle wearing the maid’s clothes. She sold her jewelry to finance a trip to London.

Hedwig made it out of Austria just in time. Hitler annexed the country in 1938 and took over Mandl’s business. Mandl was half-Jewish, so being an arms supplier to the Third Reich was no help to him. He had to flee to Argentina, where he eventually became an adviser to Juan Peron.

Into the Movies

In London, Kiesler arranged a meeting with the Hollywood film titan Louis B. Mayer. He knew of her, of course, and he too was captivated by her beauty. On the voyage to America she signed a long-term contract and became one of MGM’s biggest stars of the time.

Hedy and Paul Henreid in “The Conspirators”

She was in more than 20 films, costarring with Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Paul Henreid, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy and others. Algiers, White Cargo, and Samson and Delilah were among her biggest screen successes. Unfortunately for Hedy, she turned down the lead in both Casablanca and Gaslight.

She made and spent, by some accounts, at least $30 million. The mansion used in filming The Sound of Music in 1965 belonged to her at the time. Her film career went into decline after Samson and Delilah in 1949.

Film fame and the showbiz scene didn’t do it all for Hedy Lamarr. She didn’t care much for the world of glitz, parties, and paparazzi. She wanted more. She wanted use her money, power, and formidable intellect to defeat the Nazis. She found an ally in composer/musician George Antheil.

Her Only True Partner

George Antheil

Antheil was an interesting individual too. His 1945 autobiography, The Bad Boy of Music, was a best seller. He was born in New Jersey in 1900 and showed promise as a musician and composer. He lived in Paris, and then in Berlin, from 1923 to 1933 when he returned to America. He also wrote books and a nationally syndicated advice column, wrote regularly for Music World and Esquire, and was a major figure in American ballet.

Antheil made his way to Hollywood to write musical scores for movies. He thought that the movie industry was hostile to modern music, however, and had little personal regard for Hollywood. He also saw Nazism for what it was. One of his magazine articles, “The Shape of the War to Come,” accurately predicted both the outbreak and eventual outcome of World War II. He joined up with Oscar Hammerstein and others in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.

Antheil and Lamarr were ideological soul mates. But that’s not what brought them together initially. He also claimed to be an expert on female endocrinology. He had written a series of articles about how to determine the availability of women based on “glandular effects” on their appearance. They had titles like “The Glandbook for the Questing Male” and another on “glandular criminology” titled “Every Man His Own Detective.”

Lamarr first sought out Antheil for help in “augmenting her upper torso,” as one web site nicely puts it. She had him over for dinner after scrawling her phone number in lipstick on his windshield after leaving a party. He suggested glandular extracts of some sort, but their talk evidently turned to technology and how it might be used to fight Hitler. Perhaps technology talk was unavoidable; she had a drafting table in her living room.

Antheil’s most famous musical work was the thoroughly avant-garde Ballet Mechanique. The work’s orchestration first called for 16 player pianos, along with two regular pianos, xylophones, electric bells, propellers, siren, and bass drums. It was hard to keep so many player pianos synchronized, so he scaled it back to a single set of piano rolls and augmented the regular pianos with several additional instruments. It produced an entirely new brand of stereophonic sound.

The Technological Breakthrough and Patent

Antheil’s expertise with player pianos was just what Hedy Lamarr needed. She wanted to design a system of controlling torpedoes that would also be hard or impossible for the enemy to jam. Single-frequency radio control was vulnerable to jamming, as she knew. If they could find a way to “change the channel” at random intervals, the torpedoes could make their way to the target.

Hedy incorporated Antheil’s method for synchronizing his player pianos. The coordination of frequency signals was done with paper player-piano rolls. Then she was able to synchronize the frequency changes between a weapon’s receiver and its transmitter. This “frequency hopping” used a piano roll to make random changes over 88 frequencies. It was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.

On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 for a “Secret Communication System” was granted to Antheil and Hedy Kiesler Markey, which was Kiesler’s married name at the time. They turned the patent rights over to the U.S. Navy, and unfortunately they never made any money from their brilliant invention.

The Navy did not end up building radio-controlled torpedoes. They might not have taken the idea seriously; after all, it came from a gorgeous woman and a flaky musician. There were also some big additional hurdles to overcome before such a system could be used with waterborne ordnance. The Navy did ask her to use her good looks to sell War Bonds, though. She agreed, and bestowed kisses for a purchase price of $50,000.

But the Navy did use Lamarr’s system beginning in 1950. It first controlled sonobuoys, the floating listening posts that detect submarines. In the sixties, it was used for secure ship-to-ship communications during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. Reconnaissance drones used in Vietnam also employed frequency hopping.

Every time you dial your cell phone, take a call on it, or log onto the Internet, you can thank Hedy Lamarr. Her invention, conceived to fight the Nazis and now called “spread spectrum,” is the foundation of all wireless communication.

“Long-term evolution,” or “LTE,” technology, is just an extension of Hedy and George’s frequency-hopping. Spread spectrum is also the key element in anti-jamming devices used in the government’s $25 billion Milstar system. Milstar satellites control all the intercontinental missiles in U.S. weapons arsenal.

Dozens of “citing patents” owned by the likes of Sony, AT&T, and Seagate now appear on the Patent Office page for Hedy Lamarr’s Secret Communication System. The latest of them was filed in 2009.

After the Glamor Fled

Micro Times magazine with coverage of Lamarr’s achievements in technology

The last half of this remarkable woman’s life was not happy. True, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr her a long-overdue award for her work in 1996. Her son Anthony Loder accepted it for her because she no longer appeared in public. She also received the prestigious Austrian Academy of Science Award from her native country.

All six of Hedy’s marriages ended in divorce. Some of her quotes about her experiences there are revealing:

“I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me. Somewhere there must be a man who could be my husband and not feel inferior. I need a superior inferior man.”

“Perhaps my problem in marriage–and it is the problem of many women–was to want both intimacy and independence. It is a difficult line to walk, yet both needs are important to a marriage.”

“I have not been that wise. Health I have taken for granted. Love I have demanded, perhaps too much and too often. As for money, I have only realized its true worth when I didn’t have it.”

Lamarr’s last movie appearance was in 1958. Her eye-candy roles had never required much acting anyway. She was usually cast as the mysterious and ravishing femme fatale. She’d often been called the most beautiful woman in the world. But when other, younger stars came along, she had fewer and fewer opportunities. She underwent plastic surgery that didn’t help. She had money problems and was twice arrested for shoplifting.

She also launched a number of lawsuits. These included going after Mel Brooks for his silly “That’s Hedley Lamarr!” in Blazing Saddles, and suing Corel Draw for using her image on packages. Both suits were settled out of court. She also wrote an autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, in the 1960s, and ended up suing the publisher.

Hedy lived her final years in seclusion in Florida, her eyesight failing and out of touch with the world that her scientific genius has helped immeasurably. She died in 2000 and was cremated. At her request, her ashes were scattered in the Vienna Woods of her native land.

I Wish I’d Known Her

Anthony Loder once said that his mother never got the chance to grow old gracefully. He also stated that he wished she had talked more to him. There was so much he never was able to ask her. She was frequently on the phone with show-business people, he remarked – Greta Garbo, Bob Hope, Barbara Stanwyck, Louis Mayer, and many others. I wonder, though, if she ever truly revealed herself to another person. Much of what ought to be known about her remains hidden.

One of the greatest satisfactions I get in my work is to hear someone say, “You captured him (or her) in that article.” When I can discover and tell of things that should be known about people, I feel that I’ve done a good deed, both for my subject and for posterity.

How I wish I’d had the opportunity to capture the fabulous Hedy Lamarr. Yes, she was a rich and pampered glamor girl, and we have too many of them. Much of her biography reads like a supermarket tabloid.

But there was so much more to Hedy. She saw monstrous evil. She looked it in the face and escaped its clutches. She made it out of Adolf Hitler’s world, and could have lived an opulent and decadent life. But she decided to do something about the evil she’d seen.

There had to be enormous goodness in her soul, enormous strength in her character. I doubt that anyone was ever allowed to see that goodness and strength for what they were, and then to tell her entire story. We’re the poorer for it.

This blog post is the best I can do for her and for you, dear reader. Danke schoen, Hedwig Kiesler. Sie möge in Frieden ruhen.

I covered college hockey for the Hockey News from 1969 to 1987, and was color radio commentator for Boston College hockey from 1973 to 1980. I’d like to share some of my memories of Len Ceglarski from those years.

Leonard S. Ceglarski passed away at the age of 91 on Saturday, December 16, 2017. Memories and tributes from the world of sport have been flowing in. As well they should.

Len Ceglarski, coach

When Lenny retired from coaching college hockey in 1992, he was the all-time winningest coach in the game, with 673 wins over 34 seasons. The first 14 seasons and 254 wins were at Clarkson College of Technology (now Clarkson University ) in Potsdam, New York. The last 20 seasons and 419 wins were at his alma mater, Boston College.

Len had succeeded the man who was his college coach, John “Snooks” Kelley, on that lofty winningest-ever perch. Now that spot belongs to Jerry York, a man to whom Lenny gave his first job in hockey. Not a bad tradition.

Jerry was Lenny’s first assistant coach at Clarkson, a small school in a one-horse town about 50 miles from the Canadian border. During Lenny’s time, they played in a drafty old barn on an ice surface that had a neutral zone that was much shorter than regulation size. As soon as players broke out of their own end, they’d be at the opponent’s blue line. It was a building more suited to peewee hockey than to college varsity play.

But Len Ceglarski made Clarkson’s teams into a perennial power in Eastern college hockey. Rarely did they miss the ECAC playoffs at the Boston Garden. Three times they finished runners-up in the NCAA finals. Until York arrived for the last few years of his tenure, Lenny ran the show all by himself – the recruiting, the on-ice coaching, the scouting. He even had his children draw up designs and color schemes for the Clarkson team jerseys.

Len Ceglarski, player

When Snooks Kelley announced his impending retirement from BC after the 1971-72 season, the job was Len Ceglarski’s if he wanted it. He was an alumnus who had an impressive run at a place with fewer resources than BC. There would be no debate. That’s what we all believed and hoped anyway.

But Lenny didn’t approach BC athletic director Bill Flynn right away, and many very fine candidates applied. Two of the more impressive interviewees were Arlington High legend Eddie Burns, a BC man, and Tim Taylor of Harvard. Had Ceglarski not accepted the position, Taylor may well have been picked.

Finally, Flynn called Len to ask if he was interested. He was, and that was that. He and wife Ursula and their six sons moved back to Massachusetts form the North Country.

The first time I met Ceglarski was in 1969 at McHugh Forum. It was after a Tuesday night ECAC quarterfinal playoff. Clarkson knocked off host BC, 4-2, and was headed yet again to the Garden. A kid named John Halme scored two or three goals.

Lenny came up to the press row to talk to a couple of reporters. I don’t remember what was said, but I do recall thinking that he seemed like a genuinely nice man. He also must be a good coach too; his team had lost 7-2 to BC during the regular season. BC’s team was very talented. Tim Sheehy and his classmates were in their prime, as juniors, and Paul Hurley was back on defense for his final year after playing in the 1968 Olympics.

The following year, 1969-70, I began covering the game for the Hockey News. I went to my first game up in Potsdam late in February. BC had already begun a disastrous second-half slide – they lost 8 of their last 11 games – but they put up a good battle before losing 7-5. At one point, with BC on the power play, the puck skipped up into the stands. The clock operator let seven seconds run off before stopping it. The officials either ignored it or didn’t see it.

That year was the last one for Ned Harkness at Cornell. Since the mid-60s, Cornell, with a roster full of Toronto-bred junior players, had been the Red Menace. They were feared and, for the most part, hated. In 1969-70, Harkness’s team went undefeated, 29-0, and won the national championship. Clarkson lost to them 3-2 in the ECAC final at the Garden. In that game, Cornell scored in the last minute. They won again over Clarkson, 6-4, in the NCAA final at Lake Placid.

Those two losses were most unfortunate. You see, Lenny was just about the only coach in the East who could beat Cornell regularly. It was almost impossible for anyone to win in Ithaca; Clarkson beat Cornell 7-0 down there at one point, then by 2-1 two years later. So how did old Ned Harkness address his situation? By refusing to schedule Clarkson.

Harkness was the polar opposite of Ceglarski. Yes, he always had good teams and he drove them to near-perfection. But he was a bandit, a schlemiel, and a scoundrel. If an opposing team had a breakaway against his goaltender, all of a sudden the arena lights would go out. The opponents’ dressing room at Lynah Rink would be heated up to about a hundred degrees between periods. Sand would be sprinkled on the floor around the visiting team’s bench in order to dull their skates.

For two or three years before they had to meet in those 1970 playoffs, Cornell just would not play Clarkson. Cornell played a creampuff schedule – two games against all the Ivy League teams, which guaranteed them ten wins a year. They played BU and BC and once each. Lenny had no use for Ned, and the feeling was mutual. Good guys don’t always win, and the bad guy beat the good guy twice in 1970.

Since that year, I have never rooted for a Cornell team. I still don’t. Even though “some of my best friends are Cornellians,” most of their fans in those days were arrogant, obnoxious, and entitled. You’d think they were the ones who were playing the game. Cornell has renewed its rivalry with BU – and it is a good one, I’ll grant – and I pull for those Terriers every time. Old dislikes die hard.

In 1971, Clarkson was back in the ECAC final. Again they lost, this time to Harvard, by a score of 7-4. Harvard was playing inspired hockey, giving its coach Cooney Weiland a grand swan song. After the ECAC championship game in Boston, the NCAA selection committee broke precedent and selected Boston University as the East’s second team for the NCAA finals. Never before had they taken any but the playoff runner-up.

Jack Kelley’s Terriers were a great team, no doubt. They had been upset by Harvard in the ECAC semis and had a record of 26-2-1. Clarkson, which had knocked off Cornell – who else – in the other semifinal game, had a record of 28-4-1. A strong case could be made for taking BU, but it still shouldn’t have happened. Yes, I know BU won the national championship that year, but Len Ceglarski and Clarkson deserved to go to the finals in Syracuse.

I was at the last game Lenny coached against Snooks Kelley in 1972. It was up in Potsdam in late February. Clarkson was a solid team and was once again playoff-bound. BC, a rag-tag bunch, was struggling desperately to get Snooks his 500th win before retirement. That was their only objective for the season.

Miracle of miracles, the Eagles pulled it out 6-4. The score was tied late in the third period when forechecker Bobby Reardon picked the pocket of Clarkson defenseman Bobby Clarke. Reardon jammed the puck past Carl Piehl for the game winner. Piehl was the second-string goalie. Ceglarski had chosen not to play his top guy in the net, his late nephew Kevin Woods.

A year or so later, I was reminiscing about that game with Lenny, and about how critical it was, as win number 498, for Snooks in his quest for 500. He half-smiled and said, “I did my best.”

I also was at Len’s last game as Clarkson coach. It was the 1972 ECAC quarterfinals. Clarkson played at Harvard and was the better team in a close contest. But they lost. Woods was in the goal this time. He had a bad-luck play at exactly the wrong time, when a long, fluttering shot by Bill Corkery glanced into the net off his glove hand.

In the post-game locker room, neither I nor any of the other reporters addressed the elephant that was standing there by asking, “So, is this your last game at Clarkson? Are we going to see you at BC next season?” And of course, he never said a thing either.

Lenny’s honeymoon year at BC, 1972-73, was a lot of fun. Tom Mellor came back from the Olympics. Ed Kenty, Reardon, and Harvey Bennett were still around. Freshmen played for the first time on the varsity. Richie Smith, Mark Albrecht, and Mike Powers were the impact rookies. The Eagles beat Cornell for the first time since before World War II and defeated BU as well. They made it all the way to the NCAA’s at Boston Garden.

With Lenny in charge, there was a new spirit of optimism after years of feeling uncompetitive against the big three rivals – BU, Cornell, and Harvard. But consistent success was a few years away. The rest of the 1970s were rocky, up-and-down until the recruiting stabilized.

Two of the most fun-filled years I can recall were 1976 and 1978. In ‘76, BC returned to the ECAC playoffs after a two-year absence. They knocked off Cornell 6-2 in Ithaca – I never tired of beating Cornell and its oleaginous coach Dick Bertrand, a worthy successor to Harkness. Nor did Len Ceglarski. Beating Cornell delighted him more than winning against any other team.

BC also won the Beanpot in 1976, breaking a twelve-year drought, thanks largely to freshmen Joe Mullen and Paul Skidmore. Lenny had his car stolen right before the Beanpot final, a 6-3 win over BU. I think that the BC booster club would have bought him a new car every year if he could just keep winning the Beanpot.

In the 1976 playoffs, BC was seeded eighth and lost by a goal to top-seeded BU. The game was horribly officiated. John “Monk” McCarthy gave BU a preposterous third-period power play when BC’s Paul Barrett, kneeling next to the boards after a whistle, picked up the puck with his hand and flipped it over his shoulder. That was one of several lousy calls McCarthy made against both teams. Len was never one to blast referees, and he kept a tight lip that night. All he’d say for the record – almost in tears – was “I’m so proud of them.”

Regarding referees, there was only one time in all the years I knew him that Lenny’s mouth got him in trouble. In a Saturday afternoon game up at Cornell in 1980, Lenny suggested to Jack McGlynn that his refereeing objectivity had been compromised by his being a drinking buddy of Bertrand. That got him a two-minute bench minor.

I had driven up to that game, leaving at 6:00 a.m. from the BC campus with the Dailey sisters, Patty and Nancy. They worked in the athletic department and were as devoted to Lenny and his teams as any fan ever was. We saw BC dominate most of the way and prevail, 6-5, after Cornell had a late flurry to make it close.

Usually, a dangerous breakdown like that would have ticked Lenny off. But not this time. After the game he was grinning like a cat full of cream. “We looked pretty good out there today, eh?” After all, it was another win over Cornell in Ithaca.

In 1978 we had the Great Blizzard. Three of them, actually. The middle one was the worst. BC had a tough time getting its game together. They lost big to BU at the Beanpot and at Cornell. The final game of the year was a makeup against UNH on a Sunday afternoon. The winner would be fifth and the loser would be eighth. Skidmore had a good game in goal and BC pulled it out.

Dave Pearlman and I did the radio broadcast of the quarterfinal playoff game at RPI. BC should have been playing at home. RPI, mere percentage points ahead in the standings, was there because they had avoided playing BU. Their snowed-out game against the Terriers, an almost certain loss, just couldn’t be made up, sorry. Too much time out of class, our trustees are concerned, was the spin from coach Jimmy Salfi. So BC bused up to Troy, New York.

Lenny was interviewed by an RPI writer before the game. The questions, about RPI getting a home seed by avoiding BU, were almost taunting and intended to provoke. Lenny wouldn’t take the bait and asked the writer, “Well, what do you think? Do you think it was fair?”

BC ended up winning that night. When Paul Hammer scored the winner in overtime, Dave and I both jumped up in our seats. We pulled the plug out of the radio board, and for several minutes the audience back home didn’t know who won.

BC went on to win the ECAC Tournament and make it to the NCAA final game against BU. Neither team played particularly well; BU won 5-3. It was another NCAA runner-up slot for Len, his fourth and final.

BC would be a frequent qualifier for the big show but they were never able to win it. One year, it was superhuman goaltending by Providence’s Chris Terreri. Another time, BC lost its best player, Tim Sweeney, to an injury during the tourney. Bad bounces and bad luck were frequent visitors. Boston College did not win the national title until 2001, with York as coach.

Ceglarski was a player on BC’s first NCAA winner in his sophomore season of 1948-49. But that he never won a national championship as a coach is a crying shame. A coach who has such a long and successful career should get the chance to ascend to the very top of the mountain just once. It seems like the very nice guys, the gracious gentlemen like Len Ceglarski, sometimes just can’t get there.

Others in that category were Charlie Holt of UNH and Lefty Smith of Notre Dame. Each of them, like Lenny, deserved to win a national crown at least once in his lengthy and distinguished career. Perhaps they all lacked that last measure of cutthroat ruthlessness that you could see in coaches like Harkness, Herb Brooks, Bob Johnson, and Shawn Walsh, among others.

Of one thing, though, I’m certain. I’d have wanted my son to be coached by Len Ceglarski.

Gridiron Club Master of Ceremonies Tom Burke Presents the John Baronian Award for Lifetime Achievement to Jim Reid of Boston College

At this year’s Gridiron Club of Greater Boston’s College Awards Night, the John Baronian Award for Lifetime Service to Football was presented to Jim Reid, defensive coordinator at Boston College. I had the honor of introducing Jim and presenting the award. Here’s what I had to say about him.

In my 42 years of announcing football at Boston College, I’ve seen some very fine defensive teams. That includes this year’s team and last year’s. It also includes two years ago when the Gridiron Club honored Donnie Brown as Assistant Coach of the Year for putting together one of the best defenses in the country.

But I think my favorite BC defense of all time was the one for the 1994 season. That was Dan Henning’s first year as BC’s head coach. The record was 7-4-1, and they ended up ranked 23rd in the nation in the final AP poll.

The 1994 defense was coached by Jim Reid. They were a bunch of feral beasts. They had Stephen Boyd at linebacker and Mike Mamula and Stalin Colinet on the line. They sacked the quarterback 47 times. That set BC’s all-time sack record, which wasn’t equaled until last year by another defense coached by Jim.

They blew away the French school from Indiana, 30-11, and limited them to less than 100 yards passing. In the Aloha Bowl they held a heavily favored Kansas State to a single touchdown. They scored on a safety and sacked the quarterback eight times. Kansas State had minus-yardage rushing.

Jim is now in his 44th year of coaching football and in his second stint at Boston College. He’s been a member of the coaching staffs of the University of Iowa, Bucknell, Virginia, Syracuse, UMass, Richmond, and the Miami Dolphins. He’s been head coach at UMass, Virginia Military Institute, and Richmond.

Jim Reid delivering his inspirational acceptance speech after receiving the John Baronian Award in recognition of his 44 years of service to football.

Jim’s 44 years in the coaching profession, at so many levels, speak for themselves. But here’s a little something else.

Back in the mid-90s, Jim’s high school football coach, Hank Cutting, was guest of honor at a retirement dinner, over at Moseley’s on the Charles, when was finishing up at Catholic Memorial. The CM athletic director, Jim O’ Connor, had lined up a well-known and respected college football coach to be the keynote speaker – the late Peter Carmichael. Pete was a member of Tom Coughlin’s staff at Boston College.

Two days before the dinner, Mr. O’Connor received a phone call from Coughlin. He said that Pete Carmichael would not be speaking at the event. All of the BC coaching staff had to be present for review of the films from spring practice. That review was expected to run well into the evening, so they’d have to find someone else.

Standing Ovation for Jim Reid, led by Boston College’s Zach Allen (right) and A.J. Dillon (center). They received the Bulger Lowe Award as New England’s best players – Dillon for offense and Allen for defense.

Mr. O’Connor was in a bind. He put in a call to Jim Reid, who said he’d be glad to step in and speak in Pete’s place.

It didn’t matter that Jim was head coach of the University of Richmond at the time. He dropped everything, bought a plane ticket, and flew up to Boston at his own expense the next day.

That’s what I call going above and beyond in service to the game and to the people of football.

It’s an honor to present the John Baronian Lifetime Achievement Award to Jim Reid.

It was a cold and rainy evening in New York, back in 1859, and Daniel Decatur Emmet was feeling lousy. The Ohio-born Emmet, an abolitionist and a songwriter for minstrel shows, was warming himself by the wood stove and wishing he were somewhere else – preferably someplace that was warm, like the states of the American South.

Legend has that his wife sympathetically suggested, “Well, why don’t you write a song about it?”

A good idea, especially because Emmett had recently been hired by a company named Bryant’s Minstrels, and he had to come up with a new song, a “walkaround” for the minstrel show, within a couple of days.

Emmet sat down and wrote, “I wish I was in the land of cotton…”

Bryant’s Minstrels premiered “Dixie” on April 4, 1959. It was the second-to-last song in the show, billed as a “plantation song and dance” and placed there because they didn’t think it was going to be good enough to serve as the show’s finale. They were wrong. It was an immediate smash hit, as soon became the standard closing number for the Bryan minstrel shows.

You know what happened. “Dixie” became the anthem and rallying song of the Confederacy. It was played at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis and by General Pickett before his disastrous charge at Gettysburg.

But the song also was a favorite of President Abraham Lincoln. It was played at many of his campaign rallies for the 1860 election.

Not all Southerners liked it because they knew of its Yankee origin. They inserted lyrics of their own to make it more martial, such as “In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand / To live and die in Dixie.”

In 1861, a Swiss-American Confederate propagandist named Henry Hotze wrote,

“It is marvellous with what wild-fire rapidity this tune “Dixie” has spread over the whole South. Considered as an intolerable nuisance when first the streets re-echoed it from the repertoire of wandering minstrels, it now bids fair to become the musical symbol of a new nationality, and we shall be fortunate if it does not impose its very name on our country.”

Emmet, the abolitionist, expressed regret for not having worked a little harder on the song’s original composition after he saw what a success it was. He also regretted that it became the Confederate Anthem. And he never made much money from it. Had he not sold it outright for $300 to Firth, Pond and Company in 1861, he could have lived a life of luxury on the royalties.

On April 10, 1865, one day after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee, Lincoln addressed a White House crowd:

“I propose now closing up by requesting you play a certain piece of music or a tune. I thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I ever heard … I had heard that our adversaries over the way had attempted to appropriate it. I insisted yesterday that we had fairly captured it … I presented the question to the Attorney-General, and he gave his opinion that it is our lawful prize … I ask the Band to give us a good turn upon it.”

This was one way in which Lincoln showed his willingness to be conciliatory to the South – to “bind up the nation’s wounds” – and allow formerly rebellious Americans to rejoin the Union.

So next time you visit a Waffle House, remember:

“There’s buckwheat cakes and Injun batter,

Makes you fat or a little fatter.

Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.”

And there you have it. A song that, nowadays, is seen as hateful, racist and discriminatory was written by a man who was committed to the abolition of slavery. It was also a favorite of the man who freed the slaves.

Well, I guess that a book with such a title would strive to be that most-clichéd of written works: one that is “thought-provoking.”

Okay, mission accomplished, Alan Jacobs. But for me, the book is better described as “introspection-inspiring.”

The book’s subtitle is “A Survival Guide for a World at Odds.” I read a Wall Street Journal review of it a few weeks ago and was intrigued. The review didn’t lead me to believe that it was a self-help book. Rather, it held out the promise that How to Think would give the reader a measured and sober understanding of the causes and cures for the vast chasm that divides the left and the right in America’s body politic.

You can get a good deal of that understanding from this compact (156 pages) book by Jacobs, a professor of humanities at Baylor University. You’ll probably recognize attitudes and tactics from both your side of the political divide and the other side. You might even acknowledge the existence of your side’s version of the “RCO” — the “Repugnant Cultural Other” who inhabits the far shore (but who actually might be your next-door neighbor or long-time friend.)

Corollary to that will likely be a realization that you and those on your side are somebody else’s RCOs. It is, as he puts it, a “profoundly unhealthy situation.” Duh.

So, why is it this way nowadays? And is there anything we, as individuals, can do about it? If not to change the world (we can’t), then at least to chart a course through calmer waters and steer between the Scylla of the alt-left and the Charybdis of the alt-right? That we can do, and this book is a helpful guide.

Groupthink

Early in the book, Jacobs gives the example of people’s attitudes towards “The Puritans.” For the most part, to be called “puritanical” is to be insulted. Puritans are rigid, authoritarian, judgmental—right? Jacobs cites writer Marilynne Robinson, who states that this easy characterization is a “great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without the knowledge or information about the thing being disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.”

Emphasis mine in that last sentence. I think Jacobs gets it about something, a phenomenon that’s common in these days of social media, the era of the knee-jerk retweet and the forwarded-without-thinking disparagement.

We all want to belong to a group or a community, and that’s usually a positive thing. No man is an island, and so on. But a problem crops up when the group exists primarily to exclude and denigrate others. Those who belong get their comfort and feelings of safety and power from belonging. But that belonging exacts a price, both from the individual person and from the wider society.

Jacobs mentions the case of Megan Phelps-Roper, who was a card-carrying, insult-hurling member of the Westboro Baptist Church. She goes through a gradual and wrenching transformation when she encounters and is willing to talk to one of those RCOs. In the case of the Westboro crowd, the RCO is a gay guy – and she eventually sees his humanity and leaves the Westboro cocoon and her old comrades-in-arms behind.

This is an unusual example, but it’s proof that the battle lines in today’s culture wars aren’t permanent, that there’s hope. Jodi Picoult tells a story of such a transformation in her novel Small Great Things. In that fictional account, the convert is a pickup-driving, tobacco-chawing racist who eventually come to see the loving decency and professional competence of a black nurse who has cared for his child. The guy sees the light; his wife remains behind.

Both the real person and the fictional person cited here experienced a loss: of group security, of friends, and of family members. Whether it was truly a net loss, in either case, seems unlikely, because new affiliations await those who are willing to change their minds and evolve.

These experiences also both predict the final words of Jacobs’s book, Item 12 on his “Thinking Person’s Checklist.” He writes, “Be Brave. “

Yes, it does take more than a little courage to be open to the possibility of modifying your views at the risk of distancing yourself from your fellow travelers. Not everybody is up to it. Jacobs says as much near the end of the book:

“You have to be a certain kind of person to make this book work for you: the kind of person who, at least some of the time, cares more about working toward the truth than about one’s current social position.”

There are many pithy examples and light-bulb-inducing “Oh, of course” explanations sprinkled throughout the book. I’d like to cite just a couple that struck me as particularly relevant.

C.S. Lewis and the Inner Ring

It’s not surprising that Jacobs turns to C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and many other works of Christian humanism, for an erudite and prescient look at what’s become of much of our society. Lewis delivered a lecture titled The Inner Ring at King’s College, London, in 1944. I remember reading and re-reading it a few years ago, and I thought it was spot-on even then.

“…you have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring… And I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find the Rings—what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems,” Lewis told students more than 70 years ago.

And he continued,

“And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world…I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. ..of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

In applying the notion of the Inner Ring to present-day social affiliations and communities of interest, Jacobs offers the following observations and advice:

“…once we’re part of an Inner Ring, we maintain our status in part by coming up with those post-hoc rationalizations that confirm our identity and, equally important, confirm the nastiness of those Outside…Smart people have a problem, especially (though not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize anything.”

But he does offer some hope to those who try to do better, suggesting,

“You can know whether your social environment is healthy for thinking by its attitude toward ideas from the outgroup…If you have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness, or else lose your status in your community, then you should realize that it’s not a community but rather an Inner Ring.”

And Now for Some of my Most-Admired Friends

As for the “introspection-inspiring” that I mentioned up front, I‘ll give this last example because I can relate entirely to Prof. Jacobs’s feelings. I, like him, hold rather passionately to a set of beliefs and attitudes. Not all of those who are dear to me and whose friendship I treasure share those beliefs. In fact, we’re at opposite ends of the spectrum on some important cultural and political matters.

Of his friends, Jacobs writes,

“Over the years, I’ve had to acknowledge that some of the people whose views on education appall me are more devoted to their students than I am to mine; and that some of the people whose theological positions strike me as immensely damaging to the health of the church are nevertheless more prayerful and charitable, more Christian, than I will ever be. This is immensely disconcerting…Being around those people forces me to confront certain truths about myself that I would rather avoid; and that alone is the reason to seek every means possible to constrain the energies of animus.”

Bingo there, Alan. I’m glad you brought that up, and put it as you did. It’s nice to know that someone else feels as I do.

I can think of several people whom I respect and admire greatly, for things like their love for others, their worldly wisdom, and their just plain personal class. I wish I were more like them. But I know I’ll not be voting like them either, or trying to bring them around to my points of view. Not long ago, I was reminiscing with one of them about our many years of friendship. She remarked that it was good that we never tried to make it as a couple because we’d probably have ended up trying to kill each other.

Anyway, I liked this book. And perhaps I’m flattering myself, but I also like to think that I’m the type of person for whom the book will work. If you do decide to read it, please let me know if you think the same way.

I’m not Jewish. I’ve never been through a divorce. And I’m not a woman. But I can certainly relate to author Tova Mirvis and her life story, as told in her latest work, The Book of Separation.

The book, Mirvis’s fourth, tells of her journey toward ending both her first marriage and her life in Orthodox Judaism. That all-encompassing religious community both enfolded and protected her even as it constricted and repressed her throughout her youth and early adulthood. Many of us, I’m sure, have felt and grappled with fears, misgivings, and doubts similar to those that Mirvis recounts.

As the book begins, she is standing alone, before the panel of bearded, black-garbed Orthodox rabbis who will rule upon the legitimacy of the get, the divorce document that, by Jewish law, can only be issued by the husband. It’s a dramatic scene. As one who was brought up in old-time, fire-and-brimstone Catholicism, I can only imagine how I would have felt if I’d stood before a phalanx of black cassocks and Roman collars to take my leave of my own Church.

I probably would have chickened out. She didn’t. But she must have considered it many times. As she stated in those first few pages, “If you left, you were in danger of losing everyone you had loved. If you left, you were in danger of losing yourself.”

Mirvis did leave, and she did lose a lot. But she gained and learned much too. I daresay she will bring to mind, in many readers, a raft of similar emotions and memories and should-have-dones – particularly if religion was a defining factor in their lives.

Did you ever feel, for instance, as she did one Rosh Hashanah when, as she remembers looking at the hats of the ladies in synagogue,

“I tried to pray, but my mind kept wandering. Under all these brims and bows, what were people really thinking? Did any of these women ever worry, as I did, that too much thinking might unravel their lives? You were supposed to believe that this way of life was the only true one…Yet along with the actual rules, there was another set of laws, equally stringent yet more unforgiving, enforced not by a belief in God but by communal eyes that were just as all-seeing and all knowing. Inside my head, a voice constantly whispered, What will they think?”

Well, I had learned that my religion was the one true faith as well. My mind also used to wander as I sat through all those masses and novenas and parish missions and Stations of the Cross. And back then, I would have dreaded the mere thought of facing the opprobrium of parents, clergy, and my Catholic community if I’d voiced my own growing doubts. I do have a few friends who did boldly voice their own doubts, early in their adult years, and in hindsight I wish I’d had their courage.

I also once lived in fear of the same God about Whom Mirvis expressed her nagging doubts: “”Did I believe in a God who cared about the smallest details of what I ate and what I wore – God the Scorekeeper, God the Punisher, God the King?”

With such passages, Tova Mirvis surely touches some raw nerves and long-buried feelings. Her readers who have ever struggled to strike a balance between God’s message and God’s earthly, self-designated messengers will probably nod in agreement and recognition.

Much of the book chronicles Mirvis’s passage through everyday life: education, marriage and family, friendships, religious practices, and eventually the harsh realities of drifting further away from spouse and community. Along the way she also explains many of the reasons behind Jewish rituals, the rich tapestry of tradition that has distinguished that remarkable people for millennia and will continue to do so.

One of the story’s turning points calls to mind another famous Jewish author – another who was divorced and remarried – Midge Decter. She once said, “Nerve is one thing all writers need.” Mirvis showed the requisite nerve when she spoke, and stood her ground, at a cultural conference run by a large group of Orthodox rabbis.

That occasion was, she noted “the last time I considered myself still inside.” She would not make her writing conform to their rules and demands. “I didn’t believe their rules contained the ultimate truth…it wasn’t just about writing honestly and freely, it was about living honestly and freely…I was no longer willing to pretend in order to belong.”

Stepping to the outside of the Orthodox community did, as expected, sever friendships and bring rejection and avoidance. The author missed being inside that old community, especially on occasions like Shabbat. One consolation was her knowing “there are other kinds of communities that I can eventually build for myself – smaller maybe, less all encompassing, ones in which I won’t have to cede my independence in order to belong.

There is a telling observation Mirvis makes near the end of the book. Her children have come for the weekend. Her son Noam, who has remained Orthodox, asks her to unscrew the refrigerator’s light bulb so that it won’t go on – one of many Shabbat practices that Mirvis no longer follows.

She gladly agrees to honor his request, noting “I’m doing this, and other actions like it, to help Noam be part of this world that he is choosing. And doing so comes not only in the broad strokes and large proclamations about love and respect but in each of the minute actions – not just God, not just sin, lay in the details, but love lived there too.”

Yes, it is the little things. God and love both are to be found in the details of our everyday lives.

Another heartening passage comes late in the book when Mirvis returns to the scene at the beginning. She’s alone with that formidable panel of senior rabbis. They’ve examined the get, the divorce document whose official name is sefer kritut, a book of termination, of rending, of separation.

The document, written in Aramaic and dated 5772 from the creation of the world, is in order. In keeping with ancient rite, the senior rabbi folds it up tight and drops it into her cupped hands. She must signify acceptance – clasp the get to her bosom, turn, and walk from the room. When the door closes behind her, the divorce takes effect.

They summon her back into the room, where one of the rabbis takes the document, draws an X on it, then tears it up so that no one could ever examine it and find an error. It’s over. After the rabbis recount some of her future obligations and she’s about to leave, the head of the court looks her in the eye.

She says, at that point, that she was steeling herself for rebuke. That’s another thing I can imagine doing. In fact, I’d be expecting to hear that I’m bound for the outer darkness, where there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

No such rebuke happened. Instead, the man tells her a story. The Talmud, he explains, said that the Temple altar weeps when a man divorces his wife. There was once a rabbi who went through a divorce; his students were confused and puzzled that it could even happen.

“Better the altar should weep than should I,” came that divorced rabbi’s reply.

With that, the senior rabbi tells Mirvis, “It’s a new beginning. Go forth, become the person you need to be.”

That’s wise counsel for anyone, of any age, of any religious faith. And this is a book I’d recommend for anyone of any age, gender, or faith as well.

On October 18, 2017, the Gridiron Club of Greater Boston honored Larry Eisenhauer of the Boston Patriots as its Man of the Year. Larry was a superb defensive end for the Pats; he played from 1961 to 1969 and retired just before the American Football League merged with the National Football League.

I served as Master of Ceremonies for the evening. My welcoming remarks follow.

We usually call this “NFL Legends Night,” but that’s not true this evening. We’re honoring a hero of the American Football League, so welcome to AFL Legends Night for 2017.

The AFL, born in 1960. With commissioner Joe Foss. Let me tell you about Joe Foss.

He was governor of South Dakota at the time he was asked to be AFL Commissioner. Joe was a Greatest Generation member. In World War II, he was Marine fighter pilot in the Guadalcanal campaign. He was launched off an aircraft carrier, by catapult, and flew 350 miles to that island in the South Pacific.

The Marines had already landed there. They were in desperate straits, surrounded by the Japanese, hemmed into a small perimeter that fortunately had an airfield.

Joe Foss became head of what they called the Cactus Air Force. Guadalcanal was code named Cactus.

The fight for that island, and in fact the fight for the Pacific, was decided largely in the skies. The Japanese fought with Mitsubishi Zero fighters; there were 72 of them shot down in the skies over the Solomon Islands. Joe Foss shot down 26 of them. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt. Joe Foss’s total victories matched those of Eddie Rickenbacker, the “Ace of Aces,” in World War One.

What better guy to lead the American Football League – to lead a revolution against the establishment National Football league – than Joe Foss?

Joe Foss receiving the Medal of Honor from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as his wife and mother look on.

He would have been a great president of the United States of America.

Joe came to mind when I was thinking about how we might begin this evening’s program. But something else that kept coming up was a television show about early America. I’m sure some of you remember it. The HBO series about John Adams, starring Paul Giamatti, back in 2008.

Now, John Adams is a guy I’ve always felt a little sorry for. He was a one term president, between Washington and Jefferson, and the history books have always given him short shrift. The HBO series and the biography by David McCullough changed that. That’s a good thing.

Adams made a lot of mistakes and made a lot of enemies. But he was a true patriot, devoted to his country and his cause, and he was right on all the big questions.

What brought the series to mind, as I was thinking about tonight, was an interview with the producer. He talked about how they did not sugarcoat the portrayal of colonial times. There was hardship always – worried about money – violence, brutality and unfairness. It was hard, just to survive. They wanted to show just how hard it was.

Boston Patriots’ founding owner Billy Sullivan

Well, it wasn’t easy for the American Football League to survive, back in those early days. In fact, it was pretty darn hard. The money? Well, let’s just say that an AFL salary might pay for a couple of practice sessions of NFL players today. The playing and practice conditions? Maybe we’ll hear something of them later in the program.

But like John Adams as president, the AFL with Joe Foss at the head, got one thing right. One very big thing, that the NFL did not get right.

When President Kennedy was assassinated on that Friday afternoon, Foss and the guys he worked for, Billy Sullivan and his fellow owners, cancelled the games for that coming Sunday. Billy, if memory serves, was the league owners’ representative at JFK’s funeral.

Pete Rozelle ordered that the NFL play its games anyway. And to Pete’s everlasting credit, he always maintained thereafter that the decision was the biggest mistake he made in his illustrious career as NFL commissioner.

But the AFL got it right the first time.

The Gridiron Club of Greater Boston’s 2017 Man of the Year, Larry Eisenhauer.

In drawing analogies between the birth of the American football league with the American nation – I really don’t mean to say that they are remotely comparable in importance. Pro sports are society’s toy department, and the AFL owners were building another section of that department. Our Founding Fathers were building a new country.

And it was a whole lot harder for General Washington, John Adams, and all of the founders of that day, to take on the British Redcoats than it was for Billy Sullivan and his motley band of revolutionaries to take on the mighty National Football League.

But take on the NFL they did. They prevailed. And unlike the Founding Fathers and the people of those colonies that became the United States of America, they had one helluva lot of fun along the way.

When the Boston College Varsity Club established its athletic Hall of Fame 48 years ago, the first class of 20 inductees included seven members of the 1940 football squad that went undefeated and won the Sugar Bowl against Tennessee. That was fitting. It had been BC’s greatest achievement in intercollegiate sports, the highlight of the school’s first golden era in the last golden days before World War II.

The man who did the most to make that bowl victory possible, other than perhaps “Chuckin’” Charlie O’Rourke, was Henry Woronicz.

Henry was not included in that first class of inductees. Nor was he named over the course of many years as, finally, all of the starting lineup of that team had been enshrined. All but Henry Woronicz.

Decades passed. Memories faded. Nominating and selection committees came and went. Henry’s name came up from time to time, but he never received enough support in the voting. Until this year. Kudos to the selection committee, and especially to Varsity Club president Richard Schoenfeld, for their commitment to reviewing the merits of “old-timers” who, for one reason or another, have been overlooked.

One of my most enjoyable assignments each year is compiling the biographies of the inductees for the 2017 induction ceremony, which is on October 6. Henry’s story follows. He and his wife Marian both died 25 years ago. It’s a shame they won’t be there in person, but we know they’ll be there in spirit, and watching from the Second Balcony.

“Henry Woronicz Paves Way to Boston College Victory” trumpeted the newspaper headline. The story’s subhead read “Triumph Over Mighty Men of Tennessee Real Lift for New England Football – Henry Woronicz Blocks Kick to Turn Tide.”

As one writer described it, “the breakaway plays, snap passes, and vicious line play kept the record throng at Tulane Stadium in a uproar.” At left end on both offense and defense, Henry Woronicz was right in the thick of that vicious line play for almost the entire contest.

Woronicz suffered a cracked cheekbone in the first quarter when he was smashed by an offensive lineman while rushing the passer. But he played almost every down anyway.

Tennessee led 7-0 at halftime. On the Vols’ first possession of the third quarter, Woronicz broke through and smothered Bob Foxx’s punt. It was the first block of a Tennessee kick in three years. Joe Zabilski recovered, and a few plays later the Eagles tied the score.

But it wasn’t just a blocked kick by the farm kid from Bridgewater that led to the Eagles’ victory. On the “glory play, the lace curtain clincher” in the words of the Boston Globe’s Jerry Nason, Woronicz made it happen.

The score was tied at 13, and the clock was winding down. O’Rourke passes of 19, 24, and seven yards brought the ball to the Tennessee 24. With the Vols all thinking pass, Chuckin’ Charlie faded back and cocked his arm. But then he tucked it and ran around Woronicz’s left end. Henry mowed down the tacklers and Charlie dashed into the end zone.

But perhaps none of those Sugar Bowl exploits would have been possible had Henry not also turned the tide against Georgetown earlier in the season. He was one of three Eagles who played the entire 60 minutes of that 19-18 triumph, called by revered sportswriter Grantland Rice, “The greatest football game ever played by colleges or pros.”

The weather was so cold and rainy that week that Boston College had to practice indoors, at the Boston Latin School gymnasium. Georgetown raced to a 10-0 lead so effortlessly that, as the book “Honor on the Line” describes, it “left Eagle fans with their collective countenance dark as the leaden sky.”

But with the situation becoming desperate, coach Frank Leahy called a play that was “..the great unveiling. O’Rourke lateraled to Lou Montgomery who rolled to his right and, while in the grasp of Augie Lio, crossed up the defense by passing the ball downfield. It grazed the fingertips of defender Allen Matuza before falling into the arms of Henry Woronicz at the three yard line, and Woronicz walked in for the first Eagle touchdown.”

Yes, Henry Woronicz was a big-play man. For both the “great unveiling” and the “lace curtain clincher,” he was Leahy’s go-to guy. But he was a hard-luck guy too. That cracked cheekbone against Tennessee was the least of his woes. A severe knee injury two years before almost ended his football days.

After a stellar career at Brockton High, Henry played on an undefeated BC freshman team and cracked the starting lineup as a sophomore. But in spring practice in 1938, he took a hit from the future Monsignor George Kerr and tore up the knee. He withdrew from school and went home to work.

Boston College didn’t forget him. A year later, down to Bridgewater came a delegation from the school – athletic director John Curley, Father “Red” Collins, and backfield coach Ed McKeever – to ask Henry to return to the Heights. They were persuasive, as was Henry’s future wife Marian Mitchell, about completing his education. So in January of 1940, he re-enrolled.

After the Sugar Bowl season, Leahy moved on and Woronicz played for Denny Myers. In the second game of 1941, a Tulane blocker chopped him from behind and sidelined him for seven games. Henry played the final game, against Holy Cross at Fenway Park, wearing a big knee brace.

Woronicz was drafted by the Green Bay Packers and got a look from the Philadelphia Eagles. He served four years in the Navy before returning to a career of teaching and coaching. His high school stops included head coaching Bridgewater High for two years and assisting at Waltham High for two. He was also head coach of the Bridgewater Rams and the Randolph Rams, both semi-pro teams.

At the college level, Henry assisted old BC mates O’Rourke and Zabilski. He worked for Chuckin’ Charlie at UMass Amherst in the late 1950s. His last stop was a five-year stint with Joe, from 1964 to 1968, at Northeastern.

In 1985, when he retired from 25 years of teaching physical education at Waltham, the evening’s program read “Henry was Waltham’s answer to Vince Lombardi; he taught by example that effort and perseverance equal success.”

Henry and Marian, who were married in November 1942, had five children: Elizabeth, Janet, Sheila, Stephen and Henry M. They also had seven grandchildren and fourteen great grandchildren. In retirement, they made several cross-country treks by car. Both Henry and Marian passed away in 1992.

Let’s let Charlie O’Rourke have the last word about the guy who did so much to make his own pigskin heroics possible:

“Henry was a helluva player. He was a good, rough tough kid who played both ways for us. He was equally good at both positions. At defensive end, nobody got around him and he was always putting pressure on the passer. As a tight end, he could block with the best. He could block and catch the football. He could also demonstrate very well as a coach and was well-liked by the players.”